Implications of the lawsuit could stretch far and wide across IT industry

FOSSPatentsblog reports that a
Texas jury has ruled against Google in a patent infringement case that will
cost the company at least $5 million in damages.

The jury
ruled in favor of Bedrock Computer Technologies LLC, a company run by
former patent reformer David Garrod, on April 20. Garrod is now a patent troll
who targets small companies that operate in the notoriously patent
troll-friendly jurisdiction of the Eastern District of Texas along with larger
companies just to have the case brought to trial in that jurisdiction.

Bedrock -- which filed the suit in June 2009 against Softlayer Technologies,
CitiWare Technology Solutions, Google, Yahoo!, MySpace, Amazon.com, PayPal,
Match.com, AOL, and the CME Group -- alleged that a Linux kernel
infringes on a
1997 patent relating to "methods and apparatus for
information storage and retrieval using a hashing technique with external
chaining and on-the-fly removal of expired data."

AsArs
Technicawrote about the
lawsuit when it was first filed in 2009: "It's a textbook example of
patent trolling: a lawsuit over a relatively broad and dubious patent executed
by a company that makes nothing itself against a random assortment of
deep-pocketed industry leaders."

It's also interesting that the CitiWare Technology Solutions is a company based
in the Eastern District of Texas that has no products, no employees, and no
longer exists.

But the Linux kernel that the jury ruled infringes on the patent is at the
heart of Google's server farm. The allegations against Google were the first to
go to trial, and Google's attempts to invalidate the patent failed.

In addition to the $5 million owed by Google, the implications of the case
stretch far and wide across the IT industry, particularly for Linux and
Google's Linux-based Android mobile OS, FOSS Patents reports.
The money owed by Google is just for past damages. Companies who continue to
use the Linux kernel will have to pay royalties.

In relation to Android, Google will most likely be forced to change the Linux
kernel it distributes with Android to remove the infringing code.

The decision also doesn't bode well for the 40-some other patent infringement
cases related to Android that Google is currently dealing with. "If
Google can't defend itself successfully against one patent held by a little
non-practicing entity from Texas, what does this mean for Oracle's lawsuit over
seven virtual machine patents?" Florian Mueller writes in the FOSS
Patents blog. "This shows that having deep pockets to afford the
best lawyers isn't enough."

Google will likely appeal the verdict.

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This article is over a month old, voting and posting comments is disabled

It is not impossible to create anything. You just have to be more imaginative these days for some something new to develop. Great things about software is there is infinite ways to write a program that can read and write the same output that the original program outputs to.

You could take a game like Angry Birds and copy it, but make a different variation.

The law suite puts a damper on things, but the open source community will find a way to create their own hash. Probably it will be better than the companies' own hash algorithm.

The patent system is at fault spreading to software domain. Patent should be for hardware and license should be for software. License makes it easier to understand how the software can be used while patent just shuts everybody up and lets the creator decide on their own terms how their creation is used. Any company or individual patenting software are basically patent trolls.

I agree with you. Did you know even colors have been patented? But I guess my point really was, how can you possibly even know if you're infringing on patents when there are millions of them and they're ludicrously broad. Even if you're just joe teenager programming a game in your spare time, you're very likely to accidentally reinvent something that's been granted a patent. Having your source code be open just opens the doors to the patent trolls. They're not going to bother you until you're uber successful. But even so, if it were not open, they'd likely never find out.